The Spirit of Love
by Illead
Summary: How do you love someone that never existed, and when did she exist? How do you explain to your wife you loved a woman that never existed, before meeting her? A fem!Greece/Spain as the idea of this, but I have Fem!Romano/Spain as the side pair to bring the objective back. Mainly SpaGre, side of Spamano. AU. One-shot.


**Authr's Note****: **I did my best here, the math is pretty close, so, I hope you like it… There's not enough Spain and Greece fanfictions, so I decided to make one. I love this pair so much; anyway, I do not own _Hetalia_, just this fanfiction. I'm unfamiliar with using characters like these, but it was worth a try. It's supposed to be sad, and an AU of sorts. Thank you for reading, if you read to the end. I meantion epilepsy in the ending, it's rare, but it happens... Serious illness. As it is… Enjoy, enjoy, friends.

Love and raunbows,

~Illead

_End of note._

**The Spirit Of Love**

If you asked Antonio what he thought of the love of his life, he would say you wouldn't believe a word he said. That was the shame in it, that his love… Wasn't even real. Even after settling down with Lovina, having four children, and loving her personality. Lovina was fiery, she gave him a challenge, and four children came from that challenge once he married her. She was something he looked forward to every day, but there was one woman he could claim to have loved more, more than even Lovina was capable of achieving. Helena. The Grecian with the two odd curls on the back of her head.

Helena was what people call his dream woman, a sleepy individual in a hospital, a patient in the same room as he was. But… People said she never existed. How did you love something that wasn't there; when did she exist, and how could he say he loved her? Helena wasn't a figment of his imagination, he had seen her when they stopped giving him the woozy drugs. Antonio had held her when she cried, over her brother Sadiq's death, over Gupta, her late husband, over her ill mother. It had been heartbreaking, but he held her through it all. And one day, she was gone. Just… Gone, the bed was made before the nurses went to fix it. Helena had disappeared.

In that regard, the hospital said she never existed, and had died a long, long time ago. Antonio was released from the hospital for his wounds in the war a week later, and that was where he met Lovina, who he told her, on their first date, that he would marry her a year from their first date. True to his word, they did… After much arguing and fighting, after love making, after everything… But she married him. He felt… Antonio felt empty, even so, after their first baby, a girl named Cecile. Cecile soon had a baby brother, a year later, named Angel; soon after him came a baby girl they called Feliciana, for Lovi's sister. And lastly, came a baby girl Antonio called Helena.

He spoiled all his children, and upon being asked by little Helena herself why she was named something unlike her siblings, Antonio just smiled sadly, shrugged, and kissed her forehead. It was all that could be said for that, really; after all, Helena Karpusi never existed, according to records. But guilt was one hell of a thing, and by the time it was their tenth anniversary, Lovina asked him why he called their fourth, and final, child Helena. Helena wasn't Spanish, it wasn't Italian, and it certainly wasn't a family name. _So why_, she asked; _why? What made you call her Helena, bastard?_

All he could do was sigh, and she stopped asking for many years after, ten years more, and by their twentieth anniversary, Antonio explained. Everything. That he had met her in the same hospital room as he was in, that she cried into his shoulder every night, that she was the one he loved first. He cried for an hour after that, Lovina understanding, scowling, but understanding. It wasn't infidelity, it was before he met her, and even then, how did you explain to your always moody wife, that you loved another person, before their first date? She didn't really understand, but she said nothing, just trying her best to comfort him. And it worked, somewhat, but then he searched for Helena, for any trace of the Grecian he fell in love with, and she in return. There was no need to tell Lovina, until he found it. He'd go to work, take his family out to eat, to celebrate weddings and anniversaries with his children, his wife, and his growing family… And one day, his little Helena, then a young woman, told him she found the mysterious woman who shared her name.

Oh. _Oh_. She knew, all along, she knew. Helena, his own Helena, knew he named her after someone he used to know. Antonio smiled sadly, said to let the dead lie, but she shook her head. So he followed the girl, hoping to God it was worth it; they stopped at a gravestone, a marker, and his heart seemed to stop, at least in theory, for he was still breathing. All he could do was sit in front of the grave marker, reading the words over and over, mumbling under his breath in a mix of Spanish and English. His daughter, his living Helena, held his shoulders as he cried, like Lovina had thirty years ago. By the time they left, he felt a heavy heart, knowing not how she appeared to him, but… He knew now, how you loved someone that never existed:

**Helena Karpusi**

**1916-1952**

**_Loving wife, sister, and daughter,_**

**_Until epilepsy took her away._**

Helena Karpusi died, ten years before he met her ghost, which seemed too real to him, and the whole family plot had the same date of death, except for her. She died ten years after her brother, at age 26, when he was 27, in a fire; six after her always-ill mother, who was 46 when she was 32; two years after her husband, who died saving her from an oncoming car, when she had been 34 and he was 32. And she had finally died when her heart gave out from her grief, making her ill. She had existed ten years before him, in that same hospital, but the fire erased her records, as well as everyone else's, ten years before he came home from war. It wasn't his to question why he met her, but he left a flower for her, and vowed to remember her as the young spirit of 25 she had been. It was for the best.


End file.
